What Rape Scene? Game of Thrones Marches On As If Nothing Happened

The scene that provoked an online fury continues to haunt the show

When they filmed Jaime Lannister raping his sister Cersei in the last episode, the showrunners not only shocked the audience, but they also jeopardized its trust in the show in ways that become quite clear in light of last night's episode.

A lot ofbrilliant analysis, led by writers like Alyssa Rosenburg at the Washington Post, Sonia Saraiya at the AV Club, Amanda Marcotte at Slate, and Madaliene Davies at Jezebel, just to name a few, have laid out in conclusive detail the many problems of that scene and also the way the director and showrunners explained it afterwards. Both suggested both a failure to convey their original intent and a bigger problem with understanding the issue of sexual consent. (For a detailed breakdown, check out this post.)

What's left now is a huge divergence between how the scene appeared on the screen and our understandings of these two characters, how they interact, and how they are developing as people.

In the only scene they shared in the new episode, Cersei reached out to Jaime to hunt down Sansa Stark in tonight's episode. This makes sense for a woman who the showrunners believe seduced her brother Jaime to get him to kill her other brother Tyrion. It's problematic in that perpetuating this kind of femme fatale stereotype doesn't exactly break any boundaries in terms of making Cersei a fully-rounded character, but it's not outside of how the audience understands her character. However, that's not the Cersei we saw in last week's episode.

While she's hardly a protagonist, Cersei has been very consistent since Season 1 with how she deals with domestic and sexual violence. The old king Robert Baratheon raped and occasionally beat her, and Cersei responded by carefully plotting his murder and ensuring that his progeny would never sit the iron throne. That woman would not go hat in hand to the man who raped her next to the dead body of her son, and ask "if I told you to find that murderous little bitch and bring me her head, would you do it?" Cersei's coolness to Jaime in this scene is explicitly linked to his belief that Tyrion is innocent, and is nowhere close to the reaction that she would have to the man who raped her.

Last week's episode also created a problem for Jaime Lannister's character. For the showrunners, Jaime's actions last week were supposed to represent Jaime (almost) succumbing to the temptation of his old life, almost becoming the man who pushed a child out of a window in Season 1 to protect his incestuous affair — setting up the scene in this week's episode where Jaime chooses to honor his word to Catelyn Stark and arms Brienne for the search. Specifically, he points to the blank space on his page in the history book of the Kingsguard and says that "there is still room left on mine." A man who knowingly violates his sister, grunting "I don't care" at his sister's repeated cries of refusal, isn't the kind of man who cares the slightest bit about redemption.

And this is what I mean by trust. At a basic, minimal level, an audience has to trust in what they saw on the scene is what actually happened; that following the laws of dramatic cause-and-effect, the show's past is going to have ramifications for the future in ways that make sense because they're consistent with character's motivations. When a show essentially re-writes the past by having characters act in ways as if what the audience saw in the previous episode hadn't happened, that trust is damaged.

I don't think it's permanently broken. The showrunners built up enough goodwill and trust through the first three seasons that most of the core audience will keep watching. But I do think that damage has been done, and there's not much Benioff and Weiss can do about it this season, which was shot months ago.

This is not the last time that the show is going to deal with scenes that bring up difficult issues — especially issues of gender. If they're going to negotiate those scenes successfully, I think that starts with listening carefully to what their fans and critics are saying.

Footnotes

1 Graves interpreted Cersei's motivations in this scene as "she needs Jaime to deal with Tyrion. That's really what that scene is about…That's probably the main reason she consents, is to pull him in, because she's results-oriented, period."

2 Graves described Jaime as someone who "wanted to be and would like to be a good knight but was raised in a family where he was not allowed to be that. In fact, quite the opposite. That's made him extremely smart and dangerous but not fulfilled, and he found in Brienne a soul mate that he'll never recover from…His only way to his true self is possibly through his brother, but the door is opened by his exposure to Brienne who if nothing else is a powerful, noble knight.."

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